Massachusetts 250: Unsung Heroes of the Revolution

Massachusetts turns 250 this year, and the Commonwealth isn’t letting the anniversary pass without finally giving credit to the fighters who never made it into the famous poems.

Paul Revere gets the glory. Sam Adams has a beer named after him. But walk the back roads of Sharon or plant your feet on Lexington Battle Green, and you’ll find markers for people Longfellow never wrote a single stanza about. They bled just as much. History just didn’t bother with their names.

Take Deborah Sampson. She grew up in Plympton and decided that wasn’t going to be the end of her story. She disguised herself as a man, enlisted in the 4th Massachusetts Regiment, and held her cover for nearly two years straight. When a musket ball found her, she dug it out herself using a penknife, a needle, and thread, because a doctor’s examination meant exposure. It’s one of the starkest things you’ll read in any account of the Revolutionary War. Eventually, a fever she couldn’t manage on her own gave her away. She was honorably discharged, went on to earn a full military service pension as the only woman to do so from the Revolutionary War, and in 1983 the Commonwealth named her its official Heroine. She’s buried in Sharon. There’s a life-size statue outside the public library there that you don’t want to skip.

Boston Lyric Opera is staging Daughter of the Regiment at Emerson Colonial Theatre, running April 24 through May 3. It’s a comic opera set during the Napoleonic Wars, and the connection to Sampson’s story doesn’t feel accidental at all. “The parallels are remarkable,” a cast member told Yankee Magazine while speaking about the production. Worth a night out. Genuinely.

Lexington is worth your afternoon, too. Prince Estabrook was an enslaved man who fought in the opening engagement of the Revolutionary War on April 19, 1775, took a wound during that battle, and earned a place on a plaque near Buckman Tavern in Lexington. The Massachusetts 250 commemoration is actively working to bring stories like his to audiences who’ve never heard them, which is exactly what a 250th anniversary should be doing.

There’s also the matter of the portraits. George Graham’s 1797 portrait of Sampson sits in the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian, painted after she’d already become a recognized public figure. Look at it and you’re looking at someone the official record nearly swallowed whole.

Don’t call any of this a correction to history. It’s not. Hancock and Adams earned what they got. The point is that the revolution was 3 things at once: a political cause, a military campaign, and a social reality that included women who sewed their own wounds shut and enslaved men who picked up muskets for a country that hadn’t promised them anything. The Massachusetts 250 commemoration is giving those stories a platform 19 generations in the making.

That’s the part that matters.